SafeSlinger: An Easy-to-Use and Secure Approach for Human Trust Establishment

Executive Summary

Users regularly experience a crisis of confidence on the Internet. Is that email or instant message truly originating from the claimed individual? Such doubts are commonly resolved through a leap of faith, expressing the desperation of users. To establish a secure basis for Internet communication, the authors propose SafeSlinger, a system leveraging the proliferation of smartphones to enable people to securely and privately exchange their public keys. Through the exchanged authentic public key, SafeSlinger establishes a secure channel offering secrecy and authenticity, which they use to support secure messaging and file exchange. Essentially, they support an abstraction to safely "Sling" information from one device to another.